| BUILDING
THE PLATFORM
Legacy (TDM) telephony systems are increasingly costly
and difficult to support. Manufacturers are withdrawing
support altogether or making it impossibly costly to
continue on legacy platforms, which introduces business
risk and spiraling operating expenses.
There is also a growing realization that upgrading
existing legacy platforms is generally more costly and
complex than deploying new systems. These disparate
communication platforms are not only costly to operate
and maintain, but more importantly do not provide the
business tools and functionality required in the market
today. Unless organizations, especially global, do not
quantify, justify and plan for a communications strategy
that more effectively delivers to the business, it is
highly likely that they will lose market share and potentially
even fail as an enterprise.
If it is accepted that migration away from these legacy
platforms is inevitable then the question becomes ‘how
do I drive that transition and compel the business to
move forward with investment now?’
Touchbase is uniquely positioned to assist global organizations
to define, justify and rationalize a communication transformation
strategy. It has 19 years experience in designing, deploying
and supporting TDM, hybrid and now Unified/Collaborative
Communication solutions. The global Engagement Model
provides a consistent and results driven process for
doing this. Clients of Touchbase benefit from solutions
that provide the execution, economies of scale and accountability
of a single point of contact – managed globally
and delivered locally.
Within ‘Building the Platform’, Touchbase
helps its clients in the following ways:
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Multi-Location Migration from Legacy Technology to Cisco
Unified Communications
In this discipline Touchbase works with the following
technologies:
IP Telephony
IP Telephony is about much more than just replacing
legacy telecommunications equipment and services. It
significantly lowers costs, it enables a multitude of
features and applications that generate significant
productivity gains and it allows tighter control and
more effective management of the technology that underpins
how a business communicates.
IP Telephony provides reliable and advanced communications
capabilities no matter if people are working at the
headquarters, at branch offices or remotely. IP Telephony
can integrate this with other services available over
the Internet, including visual communication, message
or data file exchange during the conversation, audio
conferencing, managing address books and passing information
about whether other people are available to join in
the interaction.
Multi-location organizations and contact centers can
manage voice, video, mobility and presence services
between IP endpoints, media-processing devices, voice-over-IP
(VoIP) gateways, mobile devices and multimedia applications.
By doing this organizations can lower equipment administration
costs and enable centralized network control and management.
Switching & Routing
These two core functions optimize the delivery of applications
and communications across an organization, from head
office to remote branch and individual locations to
deliver the performance, scalability, availability and
reliability needed.
Emphasis is placed on routing and switching being highly
secure, flexible and built to be compatible with future
technologies while ensuring QoS prioritization that
network applications demand. A consistent routing and
switching design gives a company’s people the
same access to business applications. Due to the centralized
management it also enables reliable service to all employees
in all locations. This is together with the provision
for evolving traffic patterns, new services and optimized
application performance.
Data Center
Data Center architecture can protect your company and
help it recover quickly from planned and unplanned disruptions
and attacks. Based on a shared, virtualized infrastructure
model, the underlying physical assets can be dynamically
adapted to changing application and service level requirements.
The network is the underlying foundation upon which
virtualized data center infrastructure runs. The network
has uniquely desirable characteristics for this expanded
role, including its pervasiveness (the network touches
all physical and virtualized network resources), neutrality
(the network is built on standards that embrace openness
and interoperability, independent of any vendor, device
or content) and scalability (the network’s proven
distributed scalability ensures data centers can safely
handle increasing loads).
Security
Companies can transfer responsibility for security and
reliability from individual computers to the network
itself. This helps protect companies from the influx
of viruses, malicious code and other infections that
end users’ computers might unknowingly acquire.
The varying methods of securing the network can use
multiple types of protection such as encryption, firewall
filtering, antivirus protection and intrusion detection
and prevention.
Wireless
Wireless technologies link the user to the corporate
network so that they can access applications and data
anywhere, anytime, on any device. Wireless networks
facilitate real-time access to people, applications
and network resources across headquarters, branch offices
and remote locations using a variety of devices.
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Complex Upgrades of Existing Cisco Technology
By upgrading current tools and systems companies can
expand the usage and drive more value from them. In
some cases it is essential to upgrade tools and systems
that will no longer be supported by the manufacturer.
Touchbase can co-ordinate the upgrade of existing tools
and systems, nationally and internationally, allowing
a consistent management strategy, improved user functionality
and more effective systems.
See
Touchbase’s Best Practice document on ‘Upgrading
Unified Communications Manager’.
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Unlocking Stalled Cisco Migrations
The fact remains that new technology represents a significant
investment and there are many organizations which have
started the migration to Unified Communications to be
faced with budget cuts (possibly due to revenue/profit
challenges or based on a lack of return from the original
investment) and, ultimately, stalled projects.
Despite the challenging economy, CXOs will always be
prepared to invest in areas where significant returns
can clearly be demonstrated. Ironically, it is the organizations
who have made the initial investment in the core UC
systems who are typically at a classic point where the
existing investment can really be leveraged to start
making a significant impact, but they need help in understanding
and demonstrating the business case to the board to
continue its investment in completing the migration
and truly leveraging the new platform.
Touchbase’s proven methodology to detail potential
business outcomes, provide justifications and professionally
implement complex systems, gives the confidence to unlock
stalled migrations so they can start to realize the
returns they have the potential for.
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